Please note that the first day, 28 of May, is only open for invited speakers, jurors, and the staff and students of the Department of Game Design. Ergo; the public Gotland Game Conference is 29-30/5.

GGC ABSTRACTS

Games That Can Change the WorldJan-Jaap Severs
At Grendel Games we think that both entertainment and serious games should be “seriously entertaining”. The games we create span a multitude of genres, target audiences and hardware platforms, ranging from game consoles like Nintendo Wii to mobile phones to PC and Mac, and catering hardcore retro gamers, cognitively impaired children and professional surgeons alike.

Games are becoming serious business, in more than one sense of the word. During this lecture we’ll look back onto ten years of serious games development at Grendel Games. We’ll delve deeper into the development processes of serious games, how to allow external expertise into your game design process, the importance of empirical evidence and how to earn your keep with serious games using past, current and future examples of real-world projects. Still, most important is how to integrate and allow for the fun, beauty and richness found in traditional entertainment games.

Pervasive games: Bringing stories to lifeEduardo Iglesias
In the near future, people will live in multiple realities, leading parallel lives in which they assume many fictional identities.
For Season 4 of Game of Thrones, Transmedia Storyteller brought the world of Westeros to Spain – allowing fans to immerse themselves in a massive multiplayer roleplaying game, encompassing video, social media, email, live events, physical locations as well as online and mobile.

This talk will look to our workflow and design process, how we use stories and technology to engage audience and a brief glimpse to the future of gaming as we see it.

Game-Based Learning on the Front LinesBrendon Trombley
A conversation about game-based learning can go wildly different depending on who you’re talking to. Many traditional-minded people might respond with doubt or outright dismissal, saying things like, “Don’t the kids play enough games as it is?” or “They need to learn the value of HARD WORK instead!” Others might envision a utopian fantasy where all learning is delivered through carefully calibrated digital games crafted by genius game designers, somehow causing all students to learn effortlessly and be deeply engaged.

Both viewpoints contain a number of misconceptions which we will dispel by sharing what game-based learning actually looks like at Quest to Learn, a New York City public school. By investigating certain realities and practicalities, we hope to equip aspiring educational game designers with new perspectives and strategies by sharing snapshots of the classroom, tips for collaborating with teachers, design considerations for school environments, and our own principles of game-like learning.

The Ten Commandments of Games and LearningJonas Linderoth
The idea that games have something to offer educational practices is a foundation for both new research fields as well as emerging industries. Since both games and educational practices are diverse phenomena the discussion about their connection is a multifaceted affair that comes in different shapes. For example, games are said to have qualities that increase student motivation, provide a more authentic learning experience, teach systems thinking, facilitate collaborative problem-based learning, and contain system mechanics that can be harnessed by other sectors (i.e. gamification). In other word it is basically a complete mess.

In this talk, Jonas summarizes 15 years of experiences from being a part this mess. He condenses the discussion down to 10 commandments that any stakeholder in the debate should be aware of.

Every Computer, Ever, In Your BrowserJason Scott
Currently, if you want to watch a video on the internet using your browser, you just do. Same for listening to music, reading a book, or seeing an image. But historical software, both interacting with and using, lies in the “old ways” of external programs and a range of odd plug-ins. At least, it used to be.

Games: What are they good for?Colleen Macklin
Entertainment, learning, activism, empathy, capitalist indoctrination, sex. Did I get your attention with that last one? These are just a small set of things that games are good for. In this talk we will show some of them, play some of them, and speculate about the ways in which games and game makers can influence how we understand and act in the world.